SDO also recorded Comet Lovejoy's entry into the sun's atmosphere: movie.

Comet Lovejoy began the week as a chunk of dusty, rocky ice more than 200 meters in diameter. No one can say how much of the comet's core remains intact or how long it will hang together after the searing heat of perihelion. "There is still a possibility that Comet Lovejoy will start to fragment," says researcher Karl Battams in a NASA news release. "It’s been through a tremendously traumatic event; structurally, it could be extremely weak."

New images received on Dec. 16th from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory confirm that Comet Lovejoy survived perihelion and show the comet receding from the sun:

At first the emerging comet was missing its tail. This might have been a trick of geometry: The comet's tail was pointing away from Earth, temporarily invisible due to foreshortening. On the other hand, the absence might have been genuine. The comet's store of surface volatile materials could have been "baked-out" by the fiery transit, leaving the nucleus unable to mount substantial jets of gas and dust. Newly-arriving SOHO images show the tail is reforming.

There could be more surprises in store for this unpredictable comet. Stay tuned for updates.

More data:Europe's Proba2 microsatellite recorded Comet Lovejoy's entrance and exit from the sun: movie. The darkening in the middle of the movie is a solar eclipse: "Proba2's orbit briefly carried it behind the earth with respect to the sun," explains Dan Seaton of the Royal Observatory of Belgium. "The timing of the eclipse was perfect. It happened while the comet was out of sight behind the sun."

CURIOSITY AND THE SOLAR STORM: Last month, a massive solar storm launched itself toward Mars just as NASA's new rover, Curiosity, was blasting off from Cape Canaveral in the same direction. Researchers say it was a welcome coincidence. For the first time in Mars-rover history, Curiosity is equipped to study solar storms, and it will be monitoring space weather all the way to the Red Planet. [full story]

Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.